EDITOR'S LETTER
Editor's Letter
A boom is reshaping land, power and local economies faster than regulation can track.
omewhere between a rezoning hearing and a utility rate case, the data center boom stopped being a technology story and became a land-use story, a power-grid story, and in many towns, the only economic development story that matters. This issue was built to follow that shift as carefully as we could, county by county and megawatt by megawatt.
We began with a simple observation: the infrastructure decisions enabling the AI economy are being made at planning commission meetings and interconnection queues, largely outside public view, long before most residents learn a facility is coming. Our reporting tries to put those decisions back in frame, with attention to who benefits, who pays, and who gets a say.
That meant favoring documented records, public filings and on-the-record interviews over sweeping claims. Where figures are estimates or illustrative, we say so. Where a number is reported by an official source rather than independently verified, we attribute it plainly. Accountability, we think, starts with being precise about what is actually known.
What follows is not an argument for or against the buildout. It is an attempt to describe it accurately, from the substation to the tax ledger, so that the communities living beside it, and the readers deciding what to think of it, have something sturdier than headlines to stand on.
THE EDITORS